Exclusive from New Scientist
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After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this "fuzzball" does contain information about the insides of a black hole.
Big reputation

Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.

"He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."

Though Hawking has not yet revealed the detailed maths behind his finding, sketchy details have emerged from a seminar Hawking gave at Cambridge. According to Cambridge colleague Gary Gibbons, an expert on the physics of black holes who was at the seminar, Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world.

In essence, his new black holes now never quite become the kind that gobble up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time, and eventually open up to reveal the information within. "It's possible that what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think you have to say the jury is still out."
Forever hidden

At the conference, Hawking will have an hour on 21 July to make his case. If he succeeds, then, ironically, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena made with John Preskill, also of Caltech.

They argued that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden, and can never be revealed".

"Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
Persönlich bin ich immer bereit zu lernen, obwohl ich nicht immer belehrt werden möchte.[/url] [/url]

I am probably making a fool of myself, but I feel that I need to put my thoughts into words.

In a Black Hole, gravity's acceleration is equal to the velocity of light. Gravity slows time and when gravity is equal to the velocty of light, time ceases. Without time, there can be no motion, that includes atomic motion. Atoms collapse to their basic components, quarks or if quarks can be broken down futher, then that. Some physicists try to quamtumize time, if time is in quamtum packets, then nothing can escape from a Black Hole. If time is linear, then at the event horizon, there is no break point and information can, for the want of a better word, leak. That means, Black Holes must continue to accumulate matter or over billions of years they will evaporate.

Well, GRAVITY can escape a black hole.

And in String theory, there's a couple theories of what 'makes gravity'.
Is a gravitron a particle.. does a gravitron move at the speed of light? Is it an instantaneous effect? Is it a wave? Or is it the bending and compressing of space?

One BBC documentary I saw mentioned that gravity may be made of gravitrons, massless particles being passed between matter like a pingpong ball is passed between pingpong players.

So.. to get data back from a spacecraft, you only need to be able to have an internet connection using gravitrons.

And?

Is the conference over?

What was he speeking then?

Love is the Law, Love under Will.

>Gravity slows time and when gravity is equal to the velocty of light, time >ceases. Without time, there can be no motion, that includes atomic motion.

While it is true time is slower as you approach lightspeed 'c', time does not come to a complete halt. The guy travelling at c will still experience his own time normally. So even if things inside the black hole fly around its centre at c, time will still pass for them. I like to think of black holes as the universe before the big bang. Did time exist before big bang? It must have in some sense otherwise the cause and effect of that fateful incident couldn't exist.
Just my thoughts, and i may be wrong.
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Ost, nej tak!
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Hawking concedes black hole bet

19:26 21 July 04

NewScientist.com news service

Black holes do not obliterate information about things which fall into them, but mangle information instead. So says Stephen Hawking, backtracking on his own theory about black holes after 30 years.

The physicist was forced to concede a bet he made with American theoretical physicist John Preskill in 1997 as he unveiled his new theory on Wednesday. Preskill had doubted Hawking's theory that black holes destroy everything that falls into them. Hawking now says information can escape from within them.

He revealed his new theory to a packed auditorium at a conference in Dublin, Ireland on Wednesday. New Scientist broke the news on 14 July that Hawking, at the University of Cambridge, had changed his mind about black holes after solving a long-standing paradox in physics.

"I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics," announced Hawking as he described his solution to the black hole information paradox.


You can read the full story here.

Hawking Concedes Defeat

July 22, 2004

Famed Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking has finally come around to accepting what many of his colleagues have thought for decades: black holes preserve information about the material that falls into them. In a lecture delivered on July 21st at a physics conference in Dublin, Ireland, Hawking outlined his reasoning and conceded defeat in a bet he made in 1997 with Caltech physicist John Preskill. Hawking bought a baseball encyclopedia for Preskill and had it shipped across the Atlantic.
Although many physicists agree with Hawking's conclusion, they don’t necessarily buy his argument. Preskill himself says he does not understand it, and Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, who sided with Hawking in the bet, is not ready to concede defeat. Mainstream media outlets have reported this story largely because of Hawking's celebrity status, not because his Dublin lecture broke new ground. "I think it is a bit overhyped," says physicist Greg Landsberg (Brown University).

What, exactly, is going on here?

In 1974 Hawking published a landmark paper titled "Black Holes Ain't So Black." Contrary to the assumption of other scientists, Hawking showed that due to quantum effects, black holes slowly radiate matter into the surrounding space — a nearly infinitesimal trickle of particles later termed "Hawking radiation." At the very end of a black hole's life, as its size has been whittled down to that of an atomic nucleus, it evaporates much more rapidly in a flood of Hawking radiation.

The rest of the story can be find here.

if you do your basic thinking of fossils and material layering... the earth itself gathers more material from space all the time in the form of dust, comet debris, etc. the matter sinks to the earth and layers, like and black hole could.
If you could ever visit a black hole, I'm sure the basic physics havent changed.

I keep hearing the arguements about time, time stopping...I dunno about this, time marches on no matter what. If we call motion stopping time stopping, like stopping an atom from spinning electrons, does that really stop time?

If you consider the big bang theory, the "Bangee" would be a massive black hole exploding. Any material in its path may well have gotten blown away.

which this thinking would say there was a universe before the big bang, which makes the steady state theory still plausible. But our telescopes try to find those tiny hints what happenned with the big bang. Perhaps we are blinded by our own sights as we can't see really what has happenned.

As far as black holes preserving information about what falls into them, well, you are what you eat...